New route to youth arts employment

A new creative employment programme has been launched to support up to 6,500 new apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships and paid internships across the arts and cultural sector. It will target unemployed people aged between 18 and 24, both graduates and non-graduates, aiming to teach them a range of skills that are needed in the arts sector. Arts Council England (ACE), which has launched the scheme, is offering a £15m grant for a provider to deliver a programme that will subsidise young unemployed people until March 2015.  

The scheme builds on projects delivered by two recent initiatives – the Cultural Olympiad based Creative Jobs Programme and the pilot DCMS Jerwood Creative Bursaries Scheme(see AP256). Through the Creative Jobs Programme, which has run to coincide with the London 2012 Festival, 40 unemployed young people aged 18 to 24 have been doing paid work at organisations involved in the Cultural Olympiad. Just over half of these were from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds.  The Jerwood bursaries scheme saw 90 per cent of its 42 participants employed in the arts at the end of the pilot, and a quarter of their host organisations went on to permanently establish the new role they had created in their organisation through the scheme.

The initiative is launched at a time of record unemployment for young people and takes forward one of ACE’s goals, to tackle the lack of diversity in the arts sector that is partly fuelled by a rise in unpaid internships, limiting access to entry level jobs.